A lost medal from World War II makes its way home

Q: I am trying to get in contact with Harold B. Hodges Jr., because my girlfriend recently found his dad’s POW medal from World War II. It has no value for us and I think it might be of more value for the Hodges family. Can you help me find him?

Mikael Martinsen

Helsingborg, Sweden

A: Thanks for doing most of the work for me, Mr. Martinsen. It didn’t take me long to locate real estate agent and contractor H.B. Hodges Jr. in Roanoke, and a short visit with him made it clear that having this medal would mean a tremendous amount to his family.

It’s a Good Conduct medal, and it was likely one of the first of many the soldier earned as an Army infantryman. He was H.B.’s dad, Harold Sr., and he was born and raised in a part of Roanoke that used to be called Hudginstown, along the Orange Avenue/U.S. 460 corridor on the way to Vinton. Harold Sr. died last year but his son said, “If he were still alive, Daddy would have got a charge out of this.”

H.B. has a collection of most of his father’s war medals, which include a Bronze Star. He was given the five-pointed cross that signifies him as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor , presented a few years ago by a representative of the French Embassy who traveled from Washington for a ceremony held at First Christian Church in Vinton.

Harold Hodges Sr., like many of his generation, didn’t much like to talk about his experiences in the war, but as near as H.B. can tell, the medal now in Sweden was likely taken from the soldier when he was captured in France in the fall of 1944. Pfc. Hodges enlisted in May 1943 when he was 20. As an infantryman, he served in North Africa, then participated in the invasion of Sicily and endured stiff resistance at Anzio before arriving in France in time for the Battle of the Bulge. In a 1990 newspaper story, Hodges described being captured in the deep snow during the battle after his 1,000-man regiment was decimated by German artillery, leaving only 200 of them standing when the enemy forced their surrender.

He spent the rest of the war enjoying the “hospitality of the Third Reich,” he told his son, but didn’t go into detail about his time with 6,000 other Allied POWs in Bad Orb, Germany, at Stalag 9B, one of the toughest POW camps in the country. They were fed a steady diet of grass soup and given 1 ounce of horse meat on Sundays. He remembered a lot of death in the camp.

“You see your buddies dying while they have no food and are starving,” he told former Roanoke Times reporter Ron Brown. “The Germans didn’t have the food to feed us.”

H.B. Hodges Jr. said he thinks that a hardscrabble upbringing in Hudginstown probably helped his father survive the ordeal. He recalls his dad’s stories of working all day in a local rendering plant as a kid in exchange for a slab of meat, and said his father marveled at the amount of food available to GIs when he was stationed in Mississippi before shipping out for the war. He’d known hunger well before he experienced it again as a POW.

When an emaciated Hodges was liberated by the American cavalry at 6:15 on the morning of April 2, 1945, the only two possessions he had at the camp were a small copy of the New Testament and a spoon he had carved from a scrap of wood. It was his only eating utensil in captivity, and his son handled them gingerly as he handed them to me from a box of mementos his father had kept on a shelf.

The things he carried into the Battle of the Bulge, including the medal that turned up in Sweden, were stripped from Hodges upon his capture and never seen again.

Now, thanks to the efforts of a Swedish couple, one more memento will find its way back home to the proud family of a war hero who didn’t much care to dwell on the past.

If you’d like to read more about Pfc. Harold Hodges’ time in World War II, the full text of the 1990 story from this newspaper is available on the What’s On Your Mind blog.

Have a question? An answer? Call “What’s on Your Mind?” at 777-6476 or send an email to whatsonyourmind@roanoke.com. Don’t forget to provide your full name, its proper spelling and your hometown.

Look for Tom Landon’s column on Mondays. Read the WOYM blog on roanoke.com anytime.

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